The torrent of illegal immigrants defining the border crisis is drawing human smugglers nationwide to Arizona like moths to a flame.
Last Wednesday, Operation Safe Streets with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office arrested a Michigan man smuggling four illegal immigrants. Then on Thursday, their officers arrested a Florida man and woman smuggling eight illegal immigrants with drugs in the car.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reports that smuggling brings in up to $15,000 per illegal immigrant or more, depending on if the individual comes from further away. As some smugglers note to reporters, the cost depends on the risk — which includes distance traveled. Based on what those smugglers shared, an individual smuggler’s cut is likely anywhere from one-third to half of what the illegal immigrant pays.
Last Sunday, CBP officers arrested a New Mexico man smuggling five illegal immigrants while driving under the influence.
Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels told “The Conservative Circus” that 926 individuals were arrested in his county for border-related crimes, 50 of whom were foreign-born. Their county jail can only hold 302 people.
Dannels explained that the high number of Americans involved in smuggling is influenced in part by the poor state of the economy.
“As economies fail, crime increases. This is advantageous to the criminal cartels that are using Americans all over the country to come to Cochise and other counties on the border to exploit their criminal behavior,” said Dannels.
Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels discusses the detrimental policies of the Biden Administration when it comes to https://t.co/gkZSEGimOT
Dannels added that the smugglers are reckless and destructive. He shared that, just last week, smugglers damaged two of his officers’ vehicles by driving into them and injured one of his officers.
Dannels said that the Biden administration refuses to mitigate the border crisis. He opined that the only possibility of improvement would come from a change in elected officials.
“The only change that’s ever going to take place, they’ve made it clear, is that people need to get out and vote in November,” said Dannels. “Border security is community security.”
A Brian A. Terry Station agent responded to military police at @Fort_Huachuca and arrested a U.S. citizen smuggling eight migrants last week.
Recognizing a possible drug overdose, the agent immediately requested #EMS after the smuggler admitted to using fentanyl. #GoodWorkpic.twitter.com/A0Db2TZkEU
Dannels stated that Biden needed to make a public statement condemning illegal crossers and declaring that the current border activity constituted a crime.
“It’s almost like we’re America second on this border down here. We have been the forgotten Americans on this border,” said Dannels.
These apprehensions are in addition to the many Arizonans arrested for smuggling illegal immigrants and drugs.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Voters in the southern Sulphur Springs Valley will find out later this week whether they get to vote on the creation of a Douglas Groundwater Basin Active Management Area that will establish new regulations for the withdrawal and use of groundwater by private landowners across a large swath of Cochise County.
And the Douglas AMA initiative could make it on the 2022 general election ballot even if not enough verified, valid petition signatures were turned in, according to an argument put forth by the group which collected the signatures.
Judge Laura Cardinal will conduct a hearing Friday on a challenge by Rural Water Assurance to block the AMA initiative from the ballots of roughly 13,450 voters whose addresses fall within the boundary of the proposed Douglas AMA.
The city of Douglas as well as the agriculture-heavy communities of McNeal and Elfrida will be impacted if the Douglas AMA is approved, as will be a portion of the city of Bisbee and surrounding areas.
Proponents of the Douglas AMA contend unregulated pumping from large agricultural wells in central and southeastern Cochise County is depleting the aquifer. They are calling for several restrictions on groundwater use and irrigation which proponents claim are necessary to prevent harm to local residents who live in the area.
Critics like Rural Water Assurance, however, argue that an AMA interferes with private property rights in a number of ways. There will also be a loss of property value from newly implemented AMA-related restrictions placed on the use of the land, they argue, including a 100-year assured water supply certification required for subdivision development.
There is also concern that the push for a Douglas AMA comes at a time when southeast Arizona is expecting to see long-anticipated renewed economic activity thanks to Congressional plans to overhaul the current Douglas Port of Entry at the Mexico border.
But the issue before Cardinal will not be about the political arguments or water policy. Instead, she is being asked to rule whether Arizona Water Defenders submitted enough petition signature to get the AMA initiative on the upcoming ballot.
Part of what Cardinal must decide is whether it matters if those petition signatures are legitimate signatures of actual registered voters living within the boundaries of the proposed AMA. Or is a random sampling good enough.
Arizona Water Defenders needed at least 1,346 petition signatures to qualify for the ballot. The group submitted 2,271 signatures on July 6 and Cochise County Elections Director Lisa Marra later reported there were 1,683 valid signatures.
However, the process Marra used did not actually verify the validity of all of the signatures. Instead, a few dozen signatures were discounted immediately due to technical issues after which a random sample validation process was used.
This resulted in an extrapolated figure being provided by Marra without any verification if all of the presumed valid signatures were in fact valid.
In its election challenge, Rural Water Assurance argues Cardinal must disqualify nearly all of the submitted petition signatures as deficient for myriad reasons from mismatched voter signatures to signers not living within the proposed AMA boundaries.
A more crucial problem, the election challenge argues, is some of the 206 petition sheets did not include a completed circulator affidavit. That affidavit must be filled out by the person who circulated the petition to collect signatures.
With 10 signatures possible on each petition sheet, any petitions not properly circulated could result in a large number of disqualifications whether the voters’ signatures themselves are valid.
For its part, Arizona Water Defenders has asked Cardinal to dismiss the election challenge. The group argues that under current state law, it is legally irrelevant whether there is actually 1,346 verified petition signatures for getting the Douglas AMA initiative on the ballot.
The only important factor, according to the group’s attorney, is that Marra’s random-sampling calculation gave the group credit for more than the required number.
“There are no longer any remaining statutory requirements for the examination and verification of each signature of each petition by the Recorder,” attorney John A. MacKinnon argues in a motion to dismiss. “If the number of valid signatures as projected from the random sample equals or exceeds the minimum required number, the initiative is entitled to be on the ballot” under one of two statues.
The Cochise County Board of Supervisors and Cochise County Recorder David Stevens have been subpoenaed to court for Friday’s hearing, as has Marra and members of Arizona Water Defenders.
Arizona currently has five AMAs. The four located in Prescott, Phoenix, Pinal County, and Tucson where created by the Legislature. The fifth was approved by Santa Cruz County voters several years ago.
On Monday, a woman who voted for her dead mother during the 2020 election was sentenced to three years of supervised probation. The sentencing was consistent with other recent convictions of voter fraud this year.
The woman, 56-year-old Krista Michelle Conner of Cochise County, had her voter registration revoked, must pay $890 in fines, and serve 100 hours of community service. Conner submitted the ballot mailed to her mother, Caroline Jeanne Sullivan, who’d died one month before. That crime qualifies as a class 6 felony.
Cochise County Recorder David Stevens told the Arizona Daily Independent that the ballot wasn’t counted because Sullivan’s death was updated in the voter registration system prior to the ballot’s arrival.
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office Election Integrity Unit (EIU) handled Conner’s case. The EIU was formed in 2019, and formed an online complaint form in the summer of 2020.
Other recent convictions of voter fraud this year include 70-year-old Marcia Johnson of Lake Havasu City, sentenced to one year probation for casting her dead father’s ballot in the 2018 election; 62-year-old Joseph John Marak of Surprise, sentenced to 30 months of supervised probation for voting as a felon six times since 2016; and 64-year-old Tracey Kay McKee of Scottsdale, sentenced to two years’ probation for voting for her dead mother in the 2020 election.
As AZ Free News reported earlier this month, an election integrity nonprofit recommended that the state clean up its voter rolls and cease no-excuse mail-in ballots to prevent further cases of fraud. Governor Doug Ducey vetoed a bill purging non-citizens and non-Arizonans from voter rolls.
Earlier this year, the Arizona Republican Party sued Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and county recorders to challenge mailed ballots. A Mohave County judge ruled on Monday that no-excuse mail-in voting doesn’t violate the Arizona Constitution.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Cochise County officials are hoping someone with experience in the repurposing of historic properties will want to purchase, renovate, and redevelop the former Bisbee High School, whose exterior dates to 1914 and most of its interior to 1920.
The three-story, four-level school designed by architect Norman Foote Marsh is part of three parcels encompassing about 1.4 acres within the City of Bisbee. The property sits within the Bisbee Historic District, which is itself included on the National Register of Historic Places.
A recently announced request for proposals (RFP) notes Cochise County intends to sell the property “to a developer for subsequent conversion from governmental office use to multi-unit residential, which may also incorporate some retail and office use.” The city council recently approved the county’s rezoning request to Commercial Mixed Use (CM-2).
According to county officials, the ideal developer would have knowledge and experience in property redevelopment, adaptive reuse of historic properties, and historic preservation. Any conveyance by the county would likely include a permanent easement to preserve and protect the building’s exterior.
“The County also expects to enter into a mutually acceptable land development agreement with the successful proposer that will govern the subsequent rehabilitation of the building and the redevelopment of the property,” the RFP states.
Despite the complexities that can come with repurposing the building, there is an interesting peculiarity to Marsh’s three-story, four-level design for the school: as a result of being built on a hillside, all of the building’s levels to have a street-level entrance, a fact attested to by Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not.
Meanwhile, another historic high school is for sale in Cochise County – the Tombstone Union High School built in 1922 along what is now State Route 80.
For the last 15 years, myriad realtors have tried to find a buyer for the two-story high school which has sat empty since 2006. The 4.5-acre property includes a separate gymnasium and science building, all of which are located near the Tombstone Historic District and historic Allen Street.
Anyone interested in more information about the sale of Tombstone HS can call Superintendent Robert Devere at 520-457-2217.
Excitement is growing in northern Cochise County after the announcement that multiple jobs will be created in early 2022 when Excelsior Mining Corp. reactivates the historic Johnson Camp Copper Mine which was first opened in the 1880s about 65 miles east of Tucson.
Johnson Camp Mine has not produced copper ore in nearly a decade but reopening the mine will allow Excelsior to take advantage of copper’s strong price. In turn, the company will use those revenues to pay for a neutralization plant for its newly opened Gunnison Copper Project, which has produced far less copper cathode than it forecasted.
Excelsior’s Gunnison Copper Project situated one mile from Johnson Camp Mine along Interstate 10 opened last year with limited operations. It is expected to produce 125 million pounds per annum of 99.99 percent copper cathode when fully operational, but this year’s goal was only 25 million pounds.
On Oct. 20, Senior VP Robert Winton said the company has produced less than 1 million pounds to date. The problem, according to Winton and CEO Stephen Twyerould, is that carbon dioxide (CO2) has shown up in Gunnison’s in-situ recovery wellfield.
The villain, they say, is calcite, a naturally-present mineral which creates CO2 when it reacts with the leaching solution injected into the wellfield.
Winton says a fix to the CO2 issue has been identified, but it will take months to update the current wells. In the meantime, company officials have decided to make improvements at the Johnson Camp Mine in order to generate higher revenues next year.
The comments by Twyerould and Winton were made during a webinar hosted by Amvest Capital, a New York-based specialist investment management and corporate finance firm focused solely on the natural resource sector.
Johnson Camp Mine and its existing SX-EW plant can provide up to five years of production from its Copper Chief Pit and the Burro Pit, which Winton says have “a lot of near surface copper.” After construction of a new leach pad and issuance of amended state permits, Johnson Camp is expected to commence production in the second half of 2022.
That means Excelsior’s current staff of about 60 (employees and consultants) will need to be bolstered, bringing much needed fulltime jobs to the Benson and Willcox areas.
According to Winton, the presence of calcite was known from geological studies, but the extent of its impact was not understood until production began at Gunnison last year.
“Calcite was certainly understood in the prework, metallurgical costs, and certainly the feasibility study which is fundamentally an acid consumption discussion,” he said. “However, the negative impacts of CO2 and how they really impacted our flow rate was certainly not envisioned and certainly became the fundamental focus of our ramp up challenges.”
The good part, Winton said, is that the calcite reaction can be managed, which is why construction of a neutralization plant funded by Johnson Camp Mine revenues is Excelsior’s immediate focus.
In 2014, the Johnson Camp property was the main asset of Nord Resources, which was forced into court-ordered receivership by creditors after years of underperformance. Then in late 2015, Excelsior Mining obtained the blessing of a Pima County judge to buy out Nord Resources’ assets.
The company then purchased thousands of surrounding acres, including the site where Gunnison Copper Project’s North Star copper deposit is located. But Excelsior officials are not putting all of their eggs in the copper basket.
Last month Twyerould released a preliminary economic assessment of another company asset, the Strong and Harris copper-zinc-silver deposit located on the northside of I-10 a few miles from Johnson Camp.
Twyerould said that if mining is undertaken at the Strong and Harris deposit it would be by traditional open pit, followed by high-grade underground mining of the remaining sulfides at the bottom of the pit. However, he cautioned that it is still too early to know if mining will be feasible.
“Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability,” he said.
Excelsior also has landholdings in the historic Turquoise Mining District, also referred to as the Courtland-Gleeson District, located approximately 30 miles southeast of the Johnson Camp Mine.
Excelsior Mining is using a six-step in-situ recovery process to produce 99.99 percent pure copper cathode sheets. The process starts with a leaching solution pumped through injection wells which have been sunk over the ore body. This is known as the wellfield.
The leaching solution then moves through naturally fractured rock and dissolves the copper. Multiple recovery wells surrounding each injection well then extract the copper-rich solution, also known as pregnant solution.
The fourth step is for the solution to be pumped to the surface for further processing during which copper is extracted from the solution and turned into copper cathode sheets. Finally, the mining solution is recycled back to the well field to be reused.
Throughout the leaching process, Excelsior Mining utilizes differential pumping and natural impermeable barriers to keep the fluids from migrating beyond the wellfield.
